The deal is interesting for several reasons. First, it marks a strategic departure for News Corp., which has in the past preferred to own larger stakes in its China ventures. It is also the first major investment News Corp. has made in traditional media since 2006, when CEO Rupert Murdoch told a meeting of industry executives in New York that he’d hit “a brick wall” in China.

Second, it is interesting because News Corp. is now leading from behind in China, preferring to play a fast second rather than trying to beat the rest of the industry. Similar linkages between Legendary Pictures and Orange Sky Golden Harvest, DreamWorks Animation and Shanghai Media Group, and Walt Disney and the Ministry of Culture/Tencent have been announced over the last year.

Despite some secrecy around specifics of the deal and Murdoch’s real intentions behind it, the move represents a wiser China strategy than News Corp.’s previous, dingo-in-the-butcher-shop approach. The history of foreign business in China has been dominated by a preference for speed over calculation: if we don’t get in early/first/biggest, the thinking went, we have no chance of success. It now seems that Murdoch has learned from costly experience the fallacy of such thinking, and now that Legendary, DreamWorks, and Disney have paved the way, he has followed.

Neither News Corp. nor its CEO have been idle these past six years, either. A quiet charm offensive has apparently been underway for at least the past two years, a period during which I think News Corp. has done a lot of listening and learning, understanding what is possible and permissible for a foreign media company here, and calibrating its ambitions accordingly. Many whom have dealt with the News kraken or one of its tentacles can attest that this is an uncharacteristic approach: normally it is News that defines what is possible in a given market.

I suspect, therefore, that this is a first step for News with Bona, and that we can expect the relationship to mature and expand based on the signals that come from the Party and the market in the next several years.